


when the hand you wanna hold is a weapon

by warsfeil



Category: Tales of Crestoria
Genre: Alcohol, M/M, i'm still writing yuna as southern instead of faux french, the unfortunate existence of human emotion, vicious' hard life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-07
Updated: 2020-12-07
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:55:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27944900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/warsfeil/pseuds/warsfeil
Summary: “What’s this, a bribe?”“Sometimes,” Aegis says, sitting down, “people do nice things without needing a reason.”Vicious’ first instinct is to call bullshit.
Relationships: Aegis Alver/Vicious
Comments: 6
Kudos: 32





	when the hand you wanna hold is a weapon

Most nights, it goes like this: there’s a vague squabble over room arrangements, Misella offers to stay with Kanata and is rapidly shot down by every adult in the group, Aegis mourns their lack of money, Yuna fails to properly seduce the innkeeper, and in the end they simply book two rooms, one for the boys and one for the girls. Vicious bails out immediately to go drink with whatever money he’s managed to round up or -- failing that -- some mild criminal intent, and no one questions him so long as he’s back at a reasonable hour the next morning.

This town’s a little different, but it’s really just another take on the same old skit. The innkeeper here is elderly, and isn’t charmed by Yuna so much as the kids of the group. She gives them a steep discount, gives Vicious a beer and a wink, and spends the evening chatting with Misella and Kanata in between actual paying customers. The innkeeper talks about getting Misella a new dress and tells stories about her grandkids, and Kanata is enthralled and Yuna is listening pleasantly and Misella keeps flushing when the attention is on her, and it’s all so domestic that Vicious takes another beer and vacates to the roof. 

It’s beer, so it doesn’t do much; he drinks it slow under the starlight, watches the houses go dark one by one. It’s a farming town, and they’ll all be up bright and obnoxiously early the second the sun peaks over the horizon, which is about when Vicious usually thinks about sleeping.

His beer is long gone by the time he hears the sound of someone else climbing up onto the roof with him. 

“Didn’t figure you’d be the one joining me,” Vicious says, as Aegis drops a bottle onto his chest. It’s not beer, but wine, already uncorked and ready to go. “What’s this, a bribe?”

“Sometimes,” Aegis says, sitting down, “people do nice things without needing a reason.”

Vicious’ first instinct is to call bullshit, but Aegis looks out on the sleepy town with a melancholy look on his face, and Vicious lets the thought drain away. 

“I’m not the kinda guy who’d know anything about that,” Vicious says, instead, and Aegis looks at him. There’s a flush high on his cheeks that tells for what happened to the first fourth of the bottle of wine, but it doesn’t quite reach any further than that. 

“Aren’t you?” Aegis asks, simply that, and Vicious doesn’t know how to reply. It’s easier, when they’re needling each other. 

“The fuck did you come up here for?” Vicious asks, instead, slamming the wine bottle over into Aegis hard enough that he rocks. Aegis takes it, drags his thumb around the rim in contemplation without actually drinking. 

“I don’t know,” Aegis says, sounding tired and weary and not at all like his normal fiery self. “The atmosphere down there was too much.”

“And my atmosphere’s better?” Vicious asks, disbelieving.

“Shockingly,” Aegis says, finally taking a sip of the wine that’s entirely too conservative for the hour of the night they’re at, “yes.”

“What the hell,” Vicious says, and drains a fourth of the bottle when it’s passed back to him. “That’s dumb. You feelin’ alright? You’re not usually that dumb.”

“Are you concerned?” Aegis says, and the way he says it -- with the way his eyes slowly raise under his lashes to look at Vicious, and the faint pull of his lips into a smile -- is completely fucking unfair, and Vicious wants to file some complaints about it. 

“No!”

“About me?”

“ _No! Fuck!” Vicious says, and he feels the lie in his bones, deep enough that he can’t just cut it out when it becomes inconvenient. It settles into him like a long-lost feeling, nostalgic and unwanted, and he hates how familiar the idea of _caring_ is. “Who would care about your skinny ass?”_

_Aegis only smiles. There’s something in his eyes that Vicious can’t unravel. He might be able to, if he tried, but he doesn’t _want_ to. He doesn’t want to take that pain in on himself. He doesn’t want to know it, to mull over it. He doesn’t want to be helpless against something that someone else is feeling when he wants them to be feeling something else._

_Aegis isn’t rising to the bait, and that’s bad enough._

_“You,” Aegis says, finally._

_“That’s bullshit,” Vicious says, and punctuates it with a wild gesture. Aegis reaches out, catches his arm by the wrist, and Vicious feels like the contact is electric. Electrifying. Electrocuting._

_“You’re awfully angry for someone who doesn’t care,” Aegis says, gently, and the words cut through Vicious like a heated knife, cauterizing the open wound as they go so he can’t even have the relief of bleeding out. Jerking away feels like the correct thing to do, but Vicious can’t bring himself to do it. Aegis leans forward, and Vicious leans back, and then Aegis leans forward some more, putting his hand onto Vicious’ thigh and Vicious freezes like a startled deer._

_“I’m not angry,” Vicious protests, unsure of when he lost the upper hand in this situation._

_“Is it easier?” Aegis asks. “To not care about anyone else?”_

_“Yeah,” Vicious says, almost automatically. “Of course.”_

_“I thought it was supposed to be hard to live as a transgressor,” Aegis says._

_Technically, Vicious has no actual defense to that, but he’s not going to go down that easy. He swings his arm up, dropping it onto Aegis’ shoulder until the wine thunks against Aegis’ back. He’s not giving up that easy._

_“Yeah, for you,” Vicious says. “Not for me.”_

_“You were someone else before, weren’t you?” Aegis says, and Vicious can’t even fucking _breathe_. “And then you lost something--”_

_“I didn’t lose anything!”_

_“--or you gave it away, or _whatever_ ,” Aegis says, and his voice slips into a speaking pattern that sounds too much like Vicious. When did he start that? When did he pick that up? “And you didn’t have to care about anyone except yourself for a very long time.”_

_“Who the fuck cares?” Vicious says. “It doesn’t matter.”_

_“Because now there’s us,” Aegis says, “and you care about us.”_

_“I don’t,” Vicious lies, again, and Aegis looks completely unconvinced, which isn’t fair._

_Aegis leans in closer still, and Vicious can’t move any further back or he’ll lose his balance and they’ll both fall off the roof._

_“I care about you,” Aegis says, and the way he says it -- it isn’t about the group anymore. It isn’t about the kids, or Yuna, or anything else, and Vicious wants to rip his own heart out before it can manage one more beat. “If you didn’t want to be cared about, you shouldn’t have saved us.”_

_“That’s not why I saved you,” Vicious says, but even he isn’t so sure anymore. He’s never felt so transparent. He’s never had to sit down and look at himself, to unravel himself, to try and understand his own feelings. Vicious moves on instinct and impulse, and it was doing great up until this exact moment._

_Was this something he’d wanted, too? He only does things when he wants something -- booze, a fight. Company, apparently._

_“Then why did you?” Aegis asks, and Vicious doesn’t want to find that answer within himself, so he drops it. He leans back in and kisses Aegis, soft and slow and all the ways he never does normally, and Aegis melts into the touch, lets his eyes close like he’s some virgin princess at a ball._

_“I’m not,” Vicious says, “the kind of guy that just does nice things for no reason.”_

_“I’m aware of that,” Aegis says, his voice a little wry. He’s leaning too far in, now, his leg tangled in one of Vicious and their shoulders hitting each other’s. “You can have your reasons, and I can have mine.”_

_“I’m a dick,” Vicious explains, needlessly. “You’re just asking for trouble carin’ about me.”_

_“We’re already transgressors,” Aegis says. “You can add it to my list of sins. I can’t unkill anyone anymore than I can stop caring.”_

_“When the fuck did you get so calm about it?” Vicious asks. Aegis, who tried to be calm and never quite mastered it; Aegis, who was an entire ocean of storms just waiting to burst. Vicious had wanted to see it, but he’d never thought he’d see this side of Aegis. An Aegis who knows where he stands; an Aegis who has the advantage._

_“I just,” Aegis says, a little helplessly, “don’t want to keep running from things.”_

_“You’re like, the most intolerable person I’ve ever met,” Vicious says, and Aegis kisses him again. Vicious thinks it’s disgustingly romantic, to be making out on top of an inn late at night with the stars above them and the city asleep below them, but even Vicious doesn’t feel like turning the makeout session into anything deeper when the ground is two stories down._

_It’s Yuna that interrupts them, eventually._

_“Brought y’all a blanket,” she offers, holding it out, “since it seemed like you were sleeping up here.”_

_Aegis takes it, and Yuna offers him a wink._

_“Pretty daring, if you ask me,” Yuna says, and Aegis flushes._

_“Whatever you’re thinking, I assure you that it’s incorrect,” Aegis says._

_“Remember to marry him if you’re making him a real woman,” Yuna tells Vicious, and Aegis makes a noise of annoyance that Vicious really likes to hear. It’s the sound he wanted to hear earlier, but he kept getting _feelings_ instead, so he presses:_

_“Hell no, I’m hitting and quitting,” Vicious says, a pure hypothetical given that he has been hitting for quite some time now and has, as discussed, yet to get to the quitting._

_“You’re doing _nothing of the sort_ ,” Aegis says, looking indignant._

_“Oh? So you _want_ me to make a proper lady out of you?” Vicious says, and Aegis stands up abruptly, the blanket still in his hands. _

_“I’m sleeping _inside_ ,” Aegis says, and storms away. Yuna waves as he goes, then turns her gaze on Vicious._

_“You looked like you needed an escape,” she offers, and Vicious sighs._

_“How much of that were you listenin’ for?” Vicious says, and Yuna just smiles._

_“Oh, don’t worry about me,” she drawls, looking satisfied in a way that says she heard way more than Vicious wanted her to. “But, you know -- he’s right.”_

_Vicious makes a face, and Yuna reaches out, puts a hand on his stomach where the mark spreads across his skin._

_“What’s wrong with finding a little comfort where you can get it?” Yuna asks. Vicious doesn’t answer, because they both know it -- the danger there is getting attached and losing something; of mourning it once it’s gone._

_It’s an interesting paradox, because none of them would ever have become transgressors if they didn’t care about people to begin with, but a fat lot of good it seems to have done any of them._

_“The kids’ve gone and made you soft,” Vicious says, but he stands, too._

_“Well,” Yuna says, “I can’t say I mind too much.”_

_Vicious scoffs, and leaves with a wave of his hand. “Whatever,” he offers, because the truth is -- it’s _nice_ , and he hates that. He shouldn’t have nice things, when he’ll only break them in the end. He shouldn’t get attached to things when he’ll only ruin them._

_So much for that, he supposes._

_Aegis is already in bed when Vicious gets there, and Vicious has the decency to kick his boots off before he drops into the bed next to him. Aegis grumbles a little, but makes room for him; there’s another bed Vicious could be using, but he doesn’t bother. It’s nice to have the room to themselves, but Vicious doesn’t feel like they’re going to be making much use of it._

_“C’mere,” Vicious says, and Aegis obliges, letting Vicious maneuver him until they’re cuddling, Aegis curled into Vicious’ chest. Vicious knows it won’t last long, because Aegis always migrates back to sleeping on his back and Vicious tends to sleep on his stomach and they usually wind up with Vicious (allegedly, maybe purposefully) drooling on Aegis’ shirt._

_It’s nice, for the moment._

_“What are you running from?” Aegis asks, his voice thick but not quite sleepy._

_“I’m right here, ain’t I?” Vicious says, roughly._

_Aegis is quiet long enough that Vicious thinks maybe he was tired enough to fall asleep right away after all._

_“For how long?” Aegis says, quietly._

_Vicious doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have an answer for that, because he doesn’t know what he wants anymore. He’s never been the kind of person to focus on running away from something; he’s always running _towards_ something. Chaos, booze, a good fight, whatever -- he’s not the kind of person that knows fear or loss or guilt._

_(Except that isn’t quite true, is it?)_

_“I’m right here,” Vicious says, instead, and Aegis lets out a little sigh into Vicious’ chest but doesn’t press the issue, which is good, because the entire thing makes Vicious’ skin crawl so much he has to fight down the urge to bolt out of bed and go find a monster to shoot in the face a few times. Then there’s the fact that it’s something he wants to do -- shooting a monster, that is -- and he’s actively _not doing it_ , because Aegis obviously wants him to stay in bed and he’s giving at least a quarter of a fuck about someone else’s feelings, which compounds the whole “desire to yeet oneself from the inn window”. It all wraps back around to Vicious feeling like he’s trying to run away, which is shitty, even if it’s what he wants to do, which is _even shittier_ , so he just buries his nose into Aegis’ hair (it smells like citrus, what the fuck?) and makes a face that no one can see in the darkness._

_Aegis does not respond, but his breathing does eventually even out into the telling sound of him falling asleep._

_Vicious does not go out the window._

_He eventually sleeps, but it takes a long time, and he spends the entirety of his awake period contemplating the strange contradiction of only doing what he wants to do but also not running away from things._

__

-

Most mornings, it goes like this: Kanata is up _bright_ and early, and Misella’s rumbling stomach isn’t far behind; the two of them start the in-depth process of luring Yuna out of bed, and then Aegis prods Vicious onto the floor until he finally gives in and opens his eyes, squinting against the sunlight like a disgruntled cat. 

This time isn’t different. The innkeeper presents them all with breakfast -- Misella’s plate has at least three different kinds of meat -- and Aegis downs a good portion of coffee while gently trying to convince Misella to eat her fruit (a failure) and telling Vicious to eat literally anything (a success, but only because there was bacon). 

They set back off, and the bickering starts about three hours in, the same old familiar tune of rubbing at each other’s sore spots and it all ending in Misella threatening to burn someone.

It’s different, but only to Vicious, he thinks. It’s different, because he didn’t pay attention to the way they all naturally fell into this, to good-natured (and some not-so-good natured) teasing, to knowing when to press and when to back away, to falling back to back in battle and covering each other’s blind spots.

It’s dangerous. He should stop it. 

Instead, he catches Aegis gaze, makes a joke about replacing the stick that’s clearly up his ass. Aegis punches him in the side and Misella rolls her eyes, and the urge to run vanishes.

He can enjoy what he has for as long as he has it, he supposes. Good things don’t last long, not for someone like Vicious, but didn’t he know that when he brought them into this? Didn’t he know he was signing their death warrants eventually? Didn’t he know he was doing it on purpose, and didn’t he fucking do it anyway, because when has anything ever stopped him?

Having something is harder than having nothing at all, but Vicious threw away guilt and regret a long time ago. 

This time, maybe it’ll all go different.

**Author's Note:**

> you can find me on twitter @warsfeils, continuing to cry with every crumb of hinted backstory about vicious we receive


End file.
